Eighth Grader beats Angry Birds, Android Fragmentation

Good Wednesday to everyone! I found a few tidbits that I wanted to share today that I thought that other people would find interesting today. First off, however, I need to admit that I’ve been doing a horrible job of doing this whole picture-a-day-for-a-year thing (365 Project). I’m way behind. Oops. Perhaps I need to figure out something else I can do to keep things on this blog from getting stale. We’ll see. Anyway, moving on to the headlines of interest for today.

Eighth Grader beats Angry Birds

It seems that and Eighth Grader has kocked Angry Birds off of its position in the Top Apps list in the Apple App Store. Macworld reports that Robert Nay, of Utah, didn’t use the straight Objective-C setup that XCode hocks at developers. Matt Peckham writes:

It sounds like Nay tried Objective-C first, decided it was overly complex and moved over to GameSalad, before settling on the Corona SDK, which let him publish the game simultaneously for iPhone and Android.

Personally, I completely understand why. I’m experienced in C/C++, Java, and a few interpreted languages that I use for Web Application Development. Every programming language has a few downfalls, but the thing that always got me about Objective-C was how verbose it is. A friend of mine whose an iPhone developer has always told me that the auto-complete in XCode makes up for the difference, but reading Objective-C still seems a bit unnatural to me.

Nay’s game, if you’re interested, is called Bubble Ball. I don’t know about you, but I’m planning on checking it out because, hey, who doesn’t want to help an underdog win?

Android Fragmentation

I also saw an article today talking about how Android has become more and more fragmented over the last year or so. I found an article, also on MacWorld, talking about how most iOS devices are using the latest version of the software where most Android devices will use older versions of the Android software. I’m sure this fact isn’t new to anyone, and in fact Android has been pretty widely criticized in recent months because of this.

The article suggests, rather correctly I’m willing to bet, that the bulk of the problem comes from the fact that the phone manufacturers are the ones who are largely in charge of making sure that updates are pushed to phones and it makes better profits for them if they withhold updates and make you buy a new phone in order to get the latest version of the Android software. This is a fallacy that I have been largely immune from, because I own a phone sold directly by Google so all my updates come from them. However, those of you that are using phones manufactured and branded by others have most likely experienced the latency in getting those updates on your device.

A lot of the problem has to do with Google’s permissive licensing strategy. They essentially give the phone manufacturers free reign to do what they need to do. I’m willing to bet that this was done to be completely contrast to Apple, who controlled everything. While there are no doubt downfalls to both strategies, I’m beginning to think more and more Google is going to need to re-engineer their strategy.

As always, leave me some comment love on these issues! I’d love to hear from you!